The use and presence of handheld organizers and other such compact and lightweight portable information devices (PID's), including laptop computers, cellular phones, and pagers, has burgeoned in recent years. The availability of these items to the average consumer has placed many into use and into all aspects of one's business and daily life. The presence of these devices has become common in the home and office, on the streets, in shops and restaurants, and in places of travel.
With the growth in usage of such PID's has come the desire to provide these devices with access to the Internet. Handheld organizers can be connected to personal computers (PC's) that have Internet access and information can be downloaded from the Internet and into the handheld device, and because of the portability of these handheld devices, the wireless access to the Internet is often desired.
Recently, handheld devices have been implemented with radio frequency (RF) communications ability. Wireless transceivers with short to medium range communications ability are being incorporated into the handheld devices. In conjunction with the incorporation of transceivers within these PID's, various wireless communications protocols, such as the Bluetooth, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and I.E.E.E. (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.11 protocols, have been developed to provide standardized methods for establishing low-to-medium power, short-to-intermediate range radio frequency (RF) communications between RF enabled devices.
With the establishment of a capability for handheld organizers to communicate with the Internet using modems or wireless connections, a technological need to efficiently manage the data flow between the handheld device and the Internet has arisen. Because the Internet and Internet web-sites have been structured for data communications and delivery to desktop systems and servers, the volume of data and the delivery of the data may often be overwhelming to the handheld device and the associated data delivery system. The data display and data storage components within handheld devices are relatively small and limited when compared with those within desktop systems. Additionally, the ability to transfer data wirelessly is presently significantly more bandwidth limited than with the hardline communications of the Internet.
To address the needs of handheld devices in accessing the Internet, web clipping processes have been developed. Upon request of a handheld device, an Internet server acts as a proxy for the handheld device and gathers web-site data. In so doing, applications upon the proxy server clip the web-site content down to the core information upon the site, such as the news headlines and text within a news web-page. The core information is then transferred to the handheld device. Web clipping applications resident upon the handheld device effect the essential framework of the clipped web-site and incorporate the core information clipped from the web-site. The result is a condensed version of the web-site that is displayable upon the relatively small screen of the handheld device.
In wireless communications, data transfer can be relatively expensive and time consuming, therefore it is desirable to minimize the overhead in data transfer. Graphics and logos not essential to relaying the informative content of a web-site are removed during the web-site clipping process. It is also of benefit to remove other data commonly transferred in the communications between computing devices when it is not of an informative nature to the user.
One such non-informative data entity is the device and/or user identification information that is commonly transferred from a client device to a server device. This information is commonly transferred at every instance of a client device acquiring access to a server device for information. This data transfer burden becomes substantial, especially in a cumulative sense, when data bit transfer costs are high as they often are in wireless communications systems. Eliminating this identification information transfer would significantly improve the overall communications efficiency with regard to informative content in such wireless communications.
There remain, however, strong needs for retaining secure access to the services of the proxy server, whether accessed by communications line or wirelessly. Capacity planning requires the ability to track the number of users that are utilizing the proxy server services. Services that are often provided free of charge during the early stages of the establishment of a service market are often later subject to subscription charges and an ability to restrict access to authorized users becomes necessary.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and system for the secure activation of web clipping applications upon handheld organizers and other portable information devices (PID's) that reduce or eliminate the data transmission overhead associated with device log-in activities.